Withings Shoots for Luxury With Activit&eacute; Fitness Tracker

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As the market for wearable health and fitness monitors explodes with new devices, some critics are shaking their finger at the lack of luxury. Among the best activity trackers, you'll find plenty of sporty (and frankly, mannish) options, but very few with an eye toward fashion.

Withings is looking to change that this fall when it releases a high-end, Swiss-made watch, called the Activité, that will come with all the step-counting and sleep-tracking features you'd expect in a more gadgety-looking device.

The Activité will monitor steps taken, calories burned, distance traveled, and sleep, including time to fall asleep, total time slept, and light versus deep sleep patterns. But it looks radically different from other devices from Withings, such as the Pulse O2, that do much the same thing.

Created in Paris and made in Switzerland, the Activité is a premium and classic timepiece with a round face and traditional (analog) display. The watch has two hand dials. One shows the time, while the second indicates your progress toward meeting specific goals you set, such as taking 10,000 steps per day.

The glass is a durable crystal sapphire display with tap-enabled input. Available in black or silver, the Activité also comes with a fine leather strap, which you can swap for a plastic strap if you want to swim with the device, as it's fully waterproof. The battery is a standard coin cell.

At launch, the Activité will only be compatible with iOS devices, connecting via Bluetooth (BLE) to sync to the Withings Health Mate app.

Luxury comes with a price, of course, and Withings says the Activité will retail later in 2014 for $390.

From what Withings has shared so far about the Activité, it seems very comparable to the $349 Wellograph, which is available for pre-order but not yet officially on the market. Both are high-end watches with crystal sapphire displays—glass so hard, it's extremely difficult to crack or scratch. The killer difference, however, is that the Wellograph will have a built-in, optical heart rate monitor, whereas Withings' watch will not.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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